As is well documented, Thunderbird doesn't support Gnome VFS when browsing for attachments, which makes attaching files on network shares rather cumbersome. Here's a workaround I found which I thought I'd share. This works on my machine which runs Fedora 10 64 bit, Gnome 2.24.1 and Thunderbird 2.0.0.17.

Gnome actually mounts your VFS shares in a directory called .gvfs in your home directory. That seems to be as real a mount point as you can get - I can browse it through the shell. So, in order to get round the fact that this is a hidden directory, I just put a symbolic link to .gvfs (called 'Link to .gvfs') in my home directory. Then, when I want to attach a file, I just browse to it through this link, works a treat.

This would presumably allow one to use the GVFS drives with any program which doesn't support it natively. Very useful.

seems to be good hack.....